


Avarice

by unsettled



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-03 23:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettled/pseuds/unsettled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coward isn't what Blackwood was expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avarice

**Author's Note:**

> All due to the_me09 showing me a sentence for revision. Thanks!

He'd heard a few – more than a few – rumors about Coward before he'd met the man. Rumors about his … predilections. His 'living arrangements'. His services. 

His initial impression of Coward does nothing to dispel the image built up in his head, of some decadent, overblown leech. The man is foppish, clinging to the arm of his current patron with an unsubtle smirk, a pretty, brainless toy to be paraded about. Blackwood dismisses him out of hand. 

This may be a mistake. 

Coward, he discovers, has a voice. Has thoughts. Has a _brain_ , a brilliant, convoluted, terrifying mind. 

Coward is deadly.

He plays with Blackwood one night, lazily, amusing himself while watching Blackwood run into corners and tangles as he attempts to argue Coward's points. There's a glint in his eyes that should warn Blackwood to give in, give up, but he can't. 

"Why?" he asks Coward, finally, stuttering to a halt. He doesn't expect an answer, really, but he can't understand why Coward squanders his time as he does, seems content to play the nancy for doddering fools when he could be at the pinnacle of his peers. 

"Why what?" Coward replies, suppressed amusement in his voice and Blackwood knows that once again, Coward is toying with him. 

"Why the act?" he says. "Why spend your time catering to dullards and inverts in return for nothing more than a place to stay – that you don't even need – and pretty baubles?"

Coward laughs, not offended in the slightest. "Now, now, my arrangements are nothing to scorn."

"You could be so much more," Blackwood tells him, almost angry at the sheer waste of Coward's talents. 

"And shall you be the one to offer it?"

Yes, Blackwood wants to tell him, _yes_. He wants that. Wants Coward, wicked and sharp and tearing apart all comers with his words, setting them to dancing his tune with the slightest of direction, wants Coward naked beneath him, moaning and shivering and coming undone under his fingers, wants them both equally. 

His silence is a beat too long, and Coward looks at him far too knowingly. 

"You don't need me to offer it," he says, finally. "You don't need me for any of it; you can take what you want perfectly well on your own."

"I don't need you at all," Coward agrees mildly. Steps forward a pace and tilts his head to the side, considering. "I’m expensive to keep," he says, and Blackwood stops breathing for a second. 

Only for a second, though. 

*

"I don't need you," Coward has told him, and this is true. 

"But I want you," and this is also true. 

"And I will take you," and this is truer than anything Coward has ever said, for take Blackwood he does. Sometimes Blackwood thinks he is dancing as neatly to Coward's tune as any; mostly, he knows he is. 

Mostly, he doesn't even care.


End file.
